Example: Men and women are equally qualified by nature, but the graduating class contains 800 qualified men and 200 qualified women due to unfair "thinning". Google needs to hire 200 people, so they hire 100 men (1 out of 8 in the graduating class) and 100 women (1 out of 2 in the graduating class).
I strongly disagree with that position - as far as is possible that conversation has been had and settled; companies shouldn't be discriminating on gender. I dunno what the law in California is but my stance is that discriminating on gender should be illegal. Even if the people doing the discriminating might feel they have a moral right to it :P.
The only real solution to the gender gap involves fixing the talent pipeline and then waiting N years for the talent to start coming through. Everything else is just a stop gap that is bound to create distortions.
It would be different if there was lots of talent that just couldn't get jobs because of overt discrimination (e.g. as is the case with ageism), but the gender gap is not that easy of a problem.
Incidentally, working in a big corp, programming these days is more of a social activity than it once was for reasons completely unrelated to gender. The day of the lone wolf programmer is long past!
I wish this disastrous extrovert invasion were more clearly disclosed. It took me a long time to realize that my maddeningly arthritic big corp experience wasn't just an outlier.